Just a quick message today before I go fire up the grill with my brother-in-law and jump in the pool with my son:

242 years ago, the Second Continental Congress unanimously declared the sovereignty of the thirteen united States of America from the British Empire. The Declaration of Independence, written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, listed colonial grievances against King George III and asserted an individual’s natural rights:

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Today, I believe that no matter where you come from, you and I are entitled to the same natural rights now more than ever.

Though (some) governments certainly serve a few useful purposes (sometimes), bloated bureaucracies tend to prioritize their own survival above your individual freedoms, no matter what the cost.

When it really comes down to brass tacks, it’s up to you to protect yourself, your family, your empire, and your freedom from those who would try to take them away from you. As history has shown many times, nobody else will hold them sacred for you.

There may come times when you will have to FIGHT for your life, FIGHT for your liberty, and certainly you will have to FIGHT for your own happiness.

Freedom is a paradox, because it comes with RESPONSIBILITY. You are responsible for defending your own life when the rubber hits the road, and you are responsible for the consequences of your chosen pursuits.

So while true freedom is the opportunity to make your own choices, living a truly free life REQUIRES taking full responsibility for your choices, your behaviors, and your results.

And if you don’t like your current results — your current reality — there is nobody to blame but yourself.

This can be a hard pill to swallow. Believe me, I understand.

When my business collapsed and my world came crumbling down, I wanted to blame ISIS. I wanted to blame repugnant sex traffickers and martial law in my wife’s home country. I wanted to blame Homeland Security for insisting that we uproot our family and relocate internationally in order to get travel documents. I wanted to blame the partner who betrayed me and cooked the books.

I wanted to blame my mother for getting cancer. I wanted to blame my wife for giving me a child. I almost wanted to blame my son for scratching my cornea during roughhousing and landing me with an eye infection that took me out of commission for a month.

Hell, I even wanted to blame the flesh eating parasites burrowing intolerably slow and painfully through my feet.

I was laying in the fetal position on the tile floor of my 4-bedroom condo in Chiang Mai, Thailand one night cursing God Himself.

But the Truth was that too much avoiding responsibility caught up with me.

It was me — I had made every choice that got me there on that cold hard floor, pulling my hair out, crying and throwing a tantrum like my toddler.

Declare Your Individual Freedom

I used to think that chasing “freedom” meant running away from responsibility.

For 10 years I wanted nothing but more time freedom, more financial independence, and more freedom of location.

And I got it. For almost a decade, I lived in 8 countries across four continents.

I built and experimented with five small companies. We sold two of them.

I dated women from around the globe, and enjoyed all kinds of travel misadventures across at least 35 countries. But I allowed myself to get too comfortable, I let myself become a “victim” of my own success, and bought into the lie of the “four hour work week”, pleasure seeking, fleeing from commitments, and basically drank and smoked away a literal fortune.

In the pursuit of riches, I wrecked my health, and then I carried on abusing my body probably out of sheer self-hatred.

But it was when I realized my real RESPONSIBILITY to show my son a good example, to do my damnedest to be a good role model, to teach him everything the world will neglect to teach him, to be involved in his life and guide him any way I can, that was when my own results began ever so slowly to turn around.

In order to achieve true freedom, YES, you must cultivate an ability to control your money, control your time, and eliminate the mindset that you are subject to any higher authority (at least not here on earth).

But avoiding responsibility, perhaps counterintuitively, will ensure your failure. It will ensure that your health and vitality go down the drain. It will ensure that you create strained, stressed, and broken relationships. It will ensure you create chaos all around you.

You must take RESPONSIBILITY for your Mindset, your Health, your Wealth, and your Relationships.

This Fourth of July, take stock of where you’re at, appreciate what you have, and accept radical responsibility for your current situation. Some things will be great. Others may be a trainwreck.

This is not about guilt or shame. We are all screwups.

For my fellow Americans, be grateful that you ARE the privileged 1% of the world. The USA is an imperfect mess, but it’s one of the safest, most functional places in the world. For my Canadian friends to the north, happy belated Canada Day to you!

Wherever you are, I invite you to accept the challenge to take responsibility for cleaning up whatever areas of your life that are lacking, to realize the necessity for balance in your life, and how your mental health, your fitness, your finances, your spirituality and your connections with people around you are all interconnected.

If you go through life on autopilot, chances are you are going to let at least one of these dimensions of your life completely deteriorate.

So take responsibility to give each of these areas of your life attention, to go through your life consciously, to craft a plan for how you can maintain balance in your life, and always be vigilant looking for opportunities where you can seize MORE responsibility for things around you.

Declare YOUR personal freedom from the mistakes you have made in the past, from your baggage, from your stories, and FIGHT for your life like the men who built America had to.

Declare your freedom from the TYRANNY of victimhood. Choose not to accept the role of “victim” in this life. There is nobody holding you down. Choose to rewrite those negative stories. Trust me.

It is Time for You to Choose FREEDOM, Sovereignty, and Personal Responsibility.

If you are ready to commit yourself to a higher purpose, to double down on yourself, and have accountability, systems, and structure to help you find balance across your Mindset, Health, Wealth, and Relationships, join us as we embark upon a 12-week Dragon-slaying challenge inside the Foundry accelerator this month to turboboost your progress toward your dream goals in Q3.

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